Back when Kairosnews was first proposed, Charlie really hooked me by describing it as the sort of community everyone would want to have as a home page. (Well, and a lot of other ways, too, but that's the argument that has stuck in my mind all this time.)

Kairosnews has done so well and been so impressive that I'm wondering if now or soon might be the time to initiate a "Make Kairosnews your home page!" campaign. Electronic possibilities, of course, but also maybe as postcards or something that Kairos could print and bring to various conferences.

An idea, at any rate.

That's a great idea, James. I was thinking after reading your post that maybe we should try to become more of a "hub" site, that is, focus on offering connections and directories to other relevant sites. We have a blog roll, but it's not as useful as it could be--all I see there are names, no descriptions or any compelling reason why I should click them. Also, the "webliography" button on the navigation menu doesn't function at all. These spots that need attention.

A few other things I've noticed in my experience making sites more popular and "homepageable" are--

Regular, planned features of some sort (perhaps a weekly review, interview, brief article)- the key being that it's a regular thing, either weekly, monthly, or even bi-monthly.

Humor--perhaps a "Kairosnews cartoon" or the like, or even better, some cool flash movies. I don't know how we'd pull this off, though.

A wider variety of material. Perhaps we could do some audio blogs, or at least have more images available. In general, I'd like to move away from the textual and more towards the graphical.

Finally, I'd like to re-open the conversation about the forum. Drupal has a pretty good forum tool, though we tried it before and it never really caught on. Not sure why, but a good forum community can be a major asset to a hubsite.

I just thought of something else, though I'm not sure how feasible this is: Can we get small icons to go with the topics? If you're familiar with /., you know what I'm talking about. I'm not sure how we'd do this with the taxonomy system here and the ability to choose multiple topics, but I still think it'd add a nice graphical touch to an otherwise text-heavy site.

Yep. Category pictures would be very hard to do since we have multiple tags.

Besides, I was going to suggest that we move to freetagging for all posts when Drupal 4.7 is released later this fall ;)

Hmm...That's what I was afraid of. But maybe we can somehow make it easier for people to put graphics or images in their blog posts? Or maybe we need an illustrator here with the right perms ?

Right now, people are putting pics in by linking to them on other sites. Those are copyrighted materials, so we don't want people to actually load them onto Kairosnews.

So I'm wondering where the need is? We could install the image module which allows for image galleries, but I'm wondering what/if anything would be put there? I'm also asking because from a site designer perspective, I don't agree with the "If we build it, they will come" attitude. Rather, it's better to only provide services that directly address specific needs. For exammple, we put up forums when Kairosnews first started. Took them down 4-6 months later when they were never used after the first two weeks. Tried forums again a year or two ago. Took them down six months later when they were only used a half a dozen times.

Dang, I posted, sorta, an earlier response to this, but only previewed it. Hate that! Anyway, let me see if I can think about what I wrote.

What I thought is that maybe we could use the forums, or a straight blog would likely work just as well, to have regular poster sessions for works in progress. People could post their stuff, kinda like Mike's handout for drupal/blogging newbies, and people could respond to it, offer suggestions, revisions and so on. Something like this would build off the approach we took to CWO 2005. Any thoughts?

(I'll be sure to not just preview, but to post this time.)

We might could also use books for this. With 4.7 coming out in a few months, we'll be able to publicly display revisions much like with a wiki.

With 4.7 coming out in a few months, we'll be able to publicly display revisions much like with a wiki.

Really? Mwahahahahaha...

yep. it's Drupal wiki time :)

or a drui?